Finding FinTech support in wake of the DOL rule

Andrew King

Team lead, solutions consultant

Andrew has extensive experience in agile software development, He works with technical and business stakeholders to develop requirements for improvements to Advicent products and business processes. He also helps match technology solutions with business challenges. His professional interest are in international business development and product positioning strategy.

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Preparation for the newest DOL rule

How do you feel about your firm’s ability to comply with Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule change? Cautiously optimistic? Somewhat concerned? Downright terrified?

Chances are if you are reading this article, you fall somewhere along this spectrum, a spectrum which has the noticeable absence of “not worried at all.” Nearly every firm in the finance industry, regardless of size or shape, is evaluating a long list of business practices to ensure they are compliant with the new rules. For most, this list should include their client engagement model, though for many it may not. However, 2016 is the year that client engagement in a financial plan is no longer a “nice-to-have” or a marketing ploy. It is a core tenet of a fiduciary investment process.

The time for implementation is now

But if your firm has not already built a collaborative financial planning process into your practice management, where do you begin? A quick Google search of “financial planning client engagement strategies” returns over 1.6 million results. Adoption of financial planning can be a daunting proposition. Not only is it a change for your clients, but your advisors have to learn a new way of managing their practice and may have to master new technologies with steep learning curves that may require you to change your process to fit their limitations.

And for those advisors who already do planning, the process of presenting a financial plan to a client is a textbook example of one-way communication. Gather and input data. Analyze and identify needs. Deliver recommendations. Except now there is a spouse present who has different ideas about their retirement goals, and it turns out that the spouse has a retirement account that your original client forgot to tell you about. Do you take this information back, edit the plan, and deliver new recommendations at a follow up meeting? Shouldn’t this be the most collaborative interaction you have with your client?

Your community of FinTech support

Fortunately, you do not have answer all of these questions or figure this out alone. Many FinTech innovators, Advicent included, are responding to this need by bringing easier-to-learn and consumer-oriented financial planning technologies to market.

At Advicent, we have built an easy-to-use, professionally designed, and highly customizable presentation interface on top of our best in class planning engines. Imagine being able to show a client the impact that retiring early will have on their ability to meeting their retirement goals or how much more they would need to save per month in order to cover an additional child’s education in real-time. You will be able to do it all on a platform that allows your firm to customize not only the look and feel, but the entire planning process itself. It is best-in-class solutions like these that make the Advicent products some of the most scalable financial planning technology available in the market today.